Health and safety are critical issues in the workplace. An issue often forgotten within the domain of health and safety is workplace cleanliness. How can employee involvement, HRM, and productivity be examined in relation to workplace cleanliness? Let us examine the Department of Business and Administration, a renowned business school in a leading public sector University in Pakistan.

The department is large, offering undergraduate and graduate educational programmes with more than 2,000 students enrolled in the courses on offer. In a busy department, health and safety can always raise its head as an issue. In fact, the department occasionally receives complaints about cleanliness, despite employing nine fulltime and four part-time sanitary workers.

In recent times, cleanliness has been a strongly contested issue in the department, following the receipt of complaints from students and faculty members regarding the unhygienic state of bathrooms, classrooms, and the cafeteria. One mechanism by which complaints were raised was through suggestion schemes, whereby stakeholders submitted their complaints in physical boxes located in the main hall and cafeteria within the department. How would the director of the department respond to such complaints and seek to resolve these issues?

In seeking to respond to and resolve these issues, the director first made a decision about the problem: he deemed the cleanliness issues to be of strategic importance to all stakeholders. Therefore, a combined faculty and administrative staff meeting was called. The director believed that by calling a department-wide meeting to discuss and determine remedial actions, organisational performance would be improved and, ultimately, employees would take greater ownership of the solutions and their implementation in the workplace.

Through a series of department-wide meetings aimed at problem identification, the department realised, among other things, that the cleanliness problems stemmed from the fact that too many sanitary workers reported to a chief administrative officer alongside other workers (the span of control in an organisational reporting sense was too large) and that there was no rotation of sanitary workers; instead, they were constantly undertaking repetitive tasks. As a result of the meetings and proactively addressing the problem, the department implemented the following measures: a full-time health and safety officer was appointed and all sanitary workers reported to this position; a 'clean work environment' engagement survey was developed and administered to all staff as a means to measure the cleanliness of office spaces, bathrooms, stairwells, corridors, classrooms, grounds and the cafeteria; faculty staff were assigned to a roster as 'duty officers' to undertake independent daily audits of workplace cleanliness; job rotation was implemented for sanitary workers; and, at a strategic level, a workplace cleanliness policy developed. As a direct result of these collective interventions, the outcomes for the department were outstanding: reduced complaints and enhanced employee satisfaction. As cleanliness improved over time, the department was able to disband the roster of duty officers (using academic staff), and the workplace cleanliness policy was taken over by the health and safety officer as an administrative-focused strategic and operational task in the organisation.

Questions
1 How is occupational health and safety linked with employee productivity?
2 Identify and discus examples from organisations in your own city or country where health and safety measures have had a positive effect on employees.